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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Systems Client Experience Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )

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The new [IBM System Storage Tape Controller 3592 Model C07] is an upgrade to the previous C06 controller. Like the C06, the new 3592-C07 can have up to four FICON (4Gbps) ports, four FC ports, and connect up to 16 drives. The difference is that the C07 supports 8Gbps speed FC ports, and can support the [new TS1140 tape drives that were announced on May 9]. A cool feature of the C07 is that it has a built-in library manager function for the mainframe. On the previous models, you had to have a separate library manager server.

Crossroads ReadVerify Appliance (3222-RV1)

IBM has entered an agreement to resell [Crossroads ReadVerify Appliance], or "RV1" for short. The RV1 is a 1U-high server with software that gathers information on the utilization, performance and health for a physical tape environment, such as an IBM TS3500 Tape Library. The RV1 also offers a feature called "ArchiveVerify" which validates long-term retention archive tapes, providing an audit trail on the readability of tape media. This can be useful for tape libraries attached behind IBM Information Archive compliance storage solution, or the IBM Scale-Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS).

As an added bonus, Crossroads has great videos! Here's one, titled [Tape Sticks]

While the hardware is all refreshed, the overall "scale-out" architecture is unchanged. Kudos to the XIV development team for designing a system that is based entirely on commodity hardware, allowing new hardware generations to be introduced with minimal changes to the vast number of field-proven software features like thin provisioning, space-efficient read-only and writeable snapshots, synchronous and asynchronous mirroring, and Quality of Service (QoS) performance classes.

The new XIV Gen3 features an Infiniband interconnect, faster 8Gbps FC ports, more iSCSI ports, faster motherboard and processors, SAS-NL 2TB drives, 24GB cache memory per XIV module, all in a single frame IBM rack that supports the IBM Rear Door Heat Exchanger. The results are a 2x to 4x boost in performance for various workloads. Here are some example performance comparisons:

Disclaimer: Performance is based on measurements and projections using standard IBM benchmarks in a controlled environment. The actual throughput that any user will experience will vary depending upon considerations such as the amount of multiprogramming in the user's job stream, the I/O configuration, the storage configuration, and the workload processed. Therefore, no assurance can be given that an individual user will achieve throughput improvements equivalent to the performance ratios stated here. Your mileage may vary.

In a Statement of Direction, IBM also has designed the Gen3 modules to be "SSD-ready" which means that you can insert up to 500GB of Solid-State drive capacity per XIV module, up to 7.5TB in a fully-configured 15 module frame. This SSD would act as an extension of DRAM cache, similar to how Performance Accelerator Modules (PAM) on IBM N series.

IBM will continue to sell XIV Gen2 systems for the next 12-18 months, as some clients like the smaller 1TB disk drives. The new Gen3 only comes with 2TB drives. There are some clients that love the XIV so much, that they also use it for less stringent Tier 2 workloads. If you don't need the blazing speed of the new Gen3, perhaps the lower cost XIV Gen2 might be a great fit!

As if I haven't said this enough times already, the IBM XIV is a Tier-1, high-end, enterprise-class disk storage system, optimized for use with mission critical workloads on Linux, UNIX and Windows operating systems, and is the ideal cost-effective replacement for EMC Symmetrix VMAX, HDS USP-V and VSP, and HP P9000 series disk systems, . Like the XIV Gen2, the XIV Gen3 can be used with IBM System i using VIOS, and with IBM System z mainframes running Linux, z/VM or z/VSE. If you run z/OS or z/TPF with Count-Key-Data (CKD) volumes and FICON attachment, go with the IBM System Storage DS8000 instead, IBM's other high-end disk system.

I am now fully a week behind in my coverage of my romp through Australia and New Zealand. Last week was "week 2" of the "Tony and Anna" show! This time we were in Auckland, New Zealand. Anna Wells is from New Zealand originally, so it was good for her to be back in her home country.

Sunday I was able to take the Ferry boat to Devonport, and climb to the top of Mt Victoria, which is only 283 feet above sea level, but still affords spectacular views of Auckland from across the harbour. My hotel, the Auckland Heritage, as well as the IBM building, is about a block or two away from the Sky Tower.

New Zealand shares a lot of traits with Australia, including low unemployment and a healthy economy. Employees feel secure enough in their jobs to invest in real estate, get married and start families. School teachers are well-regarded in society, earning six-figure incomes. Retail stores were filled with shoppers spending [disposable and discretionary income]. What a refreshing difference from the United States! The level of optimism made my skin tingle. I had to file a lot of paperwork for all the work permits and visas for this trip, so I hate to think what it would take to emigrate to either country.

(Of course, the grass always appears greener on the other side. Not everything is perfect in New Zealand. I saw warning signs for toxic sea slugs in their beaches, sales advertising for [Brolly Sheets], and the south island of New Zealand suffered a magnitute 7.1 earthquake near Christchurch on the day I arrived to Auckland on the north island. Over 100,000 homes were damaged, but nobody died, and the entire country rallied support to help out those affected.)

I took this photo of a seagull walking along Cheltenham Beach. I thought it might make for a nice wallpaper for my phone or laptop.

The Storage Optimisation Breakfast at this, the fifth of seven cities, went smoothly. The New Zealand client case study she had planned to show was in the middle of an [RFP], so instead she covered [Edith Cowan University] and [Bunnings Warehouse] from Australia as examples of success stories.

Our next speaker was Glen Mitchell, an IT architect in the Operational Integration, Technology & Shared Services
of Telecom NZ. The Telecom NZ is New Zealand's phone company, recently split up into separate business units, similar to what the US government did to AT&T during the 1974 [Bell System Divestiture].

The change forced Telecom NZ to be more financially responsible. Before, they were using an all-EMC disk environment, managed by HP Enterprise Services (formerly known as EDS). The EMC gear worked as expected and Telecom NZ is happy with EMC as a vendor, but they were uncomfortable with vendor lock-in. Some firmware upgrades on their EMC boxes often forced them to take outages on hundreds of connected servers to install Powerpath updates. After an EMC disk array went off its four-year prepaid warranty, it took another FOUR YEARS to get all 180 servers migrated to another disk array. Keeping a disk array after warranty expires can cost as much as $450K NZD per year, per disk array, in maintenance fees! Ouch! This served as a strong motivator to find a way to migrate data from one disk array to another in a more smooth and timely manner.

The new direction was a dual-vendor environment, keeping some of the midrange EMC gear, and getting new IBM high-end DS8700 gear, resulting in a drastically lower TCO. To make the transition as smooth as possible, Telecom NZ employed IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) to virtualize their entire environment, both EMC and IBM happily being part of shared disk pools. They had originally planned to migrate their entire server environment over in 12 months, but in the first six weeks, they are already at 20 percent, ahead of schedule!

The SAN Volume Controllers will also allow Telecom NZ have Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery protection in a consistent manner across both EMC and IBM equipment between their two main data centers in Auckland and Hamilton.

Remember those trees shown in the movie trilogy "Lord of the Rings"? The trees here in New Zealand are amazing! I'm not an arborist, but I was told this one shown here is a [Morton Bay Fig Tree]. Some of the oldest trees in the world live in New Zealand.

By deploying IBM DS8700 and SAN Volume Controller, Telecom NZ was able to reduce costs, manage risk, and improve service delivery!